Video Games Live and the City!

So this past Saturday, I went on a trip with Tom Bigelow, Diana and her brother Danny. First stop was Newark, NJ and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center to see the 2pm showing of Video Games Live which was excellent. We took the LIRR to NYC-Penn Station, then transferred from there to NJ Transit to Newark, finally taking the Newark Light Rail to the concert hall. The Center is a lot nicer than we expected and the concert was amazing. During their traditional onstage Guitar Hero contest, the contestant surprised everyone by requesting the difficulty be turned all the way up to expert, and he still cleared the required 180,000 points with a wide margin. A double encore with music from Castlevania and Final Fantasy 7 wrapped up the show nicely. We took the Light Rail back to Newark-Penn and then took the train back to NYC-Penn, and then we went exploring. First we walked down through Times Square and made a stop in Toys'R'Us, which was quite awesome, then we went down to Rockefeller Center to see the tree and explore the area around it. We also stopped in to St. Patrick's to take photos, and made a swing by Bryant Park on the way back to the station. We just caught the 9:16 PM train back to Long Island to end our long day. Lots of fun and of course we took pictures, and they're all available here.

The take

Well the rubble from Christmas morning has been cleared away, so I thought I'd take a few minutes and write about the gifts I recieved. Here we go:

• Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer
• The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
• Sphere by Michael Crichton
• Maxtor One Touch 500GB External HD, USB
• Sony MDR-NC40 Noise Canceling Headphones
• A 12-cup coffee machine!
• A nice Nalgene bottle for school.
• A new pair of slippers
• $50 American Express Gift Card
• $15 BestBuy Gift Card

Not a bad set of gifts, I'm happy with it, and these headphone make it easy to ignore everyone else now ;-)

I'm thinking I'll use that BestBuy gift card to purchase this case for the Canon that I got from Diana last night. All in all it worked out pretty well, now to get my ass kicked at Sins of a Solar Empire....

Christmas Eve!

I just spent a nice Christmas Eve at my girlfriend's father's house. I got there around 3:30PMish, just in time to help her dad lift her grandfather back in to his wheelchair, an interesting opening. All the presents I brought were stowed under the tree and then Danny and I started a nice game of LittleBigPlanet. Once that was done, some of her other relatives had arrived so we went upstairs for drinks and snacks and socializing. I had a lot of fun with that, her family is hilarious, then after that we went back downstairs and channel surfed, ended up settling on the last 3/4 of Volcano (and for the record, I still think Dante's Peak is better!) before dinner. Dinner for me and Di consisted of Ravioli's and pasta, and soda's. Nothing too fancy, but still good! After dinner was more talking and watching Danny play some more games, then we got to present exchange time! Diana loved the speakers and the necklace I got her, and her brother enjoyed the 1600 XBOX Live points I purchased him. She gave me a really nice (and overly expensive!) Canon PowerShot A2000 IS digital camera, and her dad chimed in an 8GB memory card for it, as well as free movie passes and an Applebee's gift card! After that there was a lot of picture taking, including a new shot for my desk picture frame, which I'll post later, and a lot of Diana running away from my camera :). Also, she recieved a cool quiz game, which she announced to all her relatives she was going to beat me on, and then when we played after all the relatives left, I kicked her butt... Twice :)

And now I'm home, it was a great night though, and I'm now tired, but hungry...

Merry Christmas!

The guts!

Here are the guts of the supply! I checked out all the obvious stuff. Visual inspection of the capacitors shows they're intact. The load resistors and control potentiometers are also good, and the strapping on the back is all set for one of the supplies. Next up I'm going to get the other set up. First, a break.

Screenshot!

I felt like posting this screenshot showing how much crap I have open on both monitors, if you didn't know any better I'd look really busy and productive!!

One of the best purchases I ever made

These are my nice multimeter probes hooked up to my Data Precision 3500 multimeter. I got them on eBay for around $12. Well worth it! The comfortable grip, sturdy cables and long tips are a joy to work with. So much nicer then the crappy plastic ones on my pocket RS meter. You might notice the meter has binding posts on it. I just used my knife to cut the boot off the probes. They'll still work fine in a regular meters recessed ports.

Topless photos!

Now that I got your attention....
I'm going to attempt to rid this sucker of some problems tonight!